How to get started in game development!

Quote:C++ is also a very complex language. Once you get into multiple inheritance, templates, operator overloading... you'll quickly discover why some forum members dislike C++ and would rather use C

But that's the beauty of C++. You pay for what you use....

Unfortunately, that seems to break down into "You pay for the features that your dependencies use". I can see the value of templates, operator overloading, and the like, but it really ends up being a pain when some guy decides that | is the perfect operator for a dot product. Or that their entire library should be written in the headers as templates thinking that SomeArrayType<SomeMeshType<SomeMatrixType<float, 4, 4>,SomeVectorType<float, 3>>> is cleaner/faster/more flexible. It's little things like this that lead me to avoid the majority of C++ libraries with the passion that I would for GPL.

Just wondering if someone could give some advice on a good iPhone programming Christmas gift for my brother. He has recently got into game programming and currently uses Unity.

Does anyone know of a good gift to get someone starting out in game programming for iPhones? It would probably have to be just slightly more than begginer level as he has been using Unity for a little while now. Are there any programs/licenses that would be useful? Perhaps art packs or books?

Any help would be very much appreciated! Apologies if this is the wrong thread for this question.

hello , my name is mike (miguel) i'm a student from spain , and i'm starting in this game development world , and i've questions :

in my chase the graphics isn't a problem , i can make 2d and 3d graphics using or photoshop or 3d maya or other autodesk tool .

my problem is the structure that the game has.

i love the iPhone ,and with iOS you can show well games.

my favorite game , and by this i'm crazy (because there isn't any kind of information about) is Dark Nebula episodes (1 or 2).

is really powerful and there aren't any other game that it like than this game .

but i had done one thing( not well) is to decode de video game for to see the inside , and i'm flipping , for example , one level has some kind of archives with different extension , in particular ( .collision , .entities , .tilemap , .pvrtc and png ( and the png i can't open )

how? which is its structure ? i would need make a png with photoshop , then to put in a tile mapper and then to for example cocos 2D in Xcode?

or someone knows something else about this game and it development ? because the business or study ( 1337 game) only have one page with 1 sheet with the add of dark nebula and anything else , is a ghost business....

I haven't played Dark Nebula myself, but looking at the trailer on youtube, it looks like another labyrinth style of game, where you tilt the device to control the player? It looks like it is nicely done.

Anyway, one thing you will quickly discover about game development is that it is much harder than you first imagine, depending on what you want to do. One way to greatly increase your odds of finishing a game is to start small. Another helpful thing to do is to use a third-party game engine, such as Unity3D or Corona, or something similar. I personally have very little recent experience with third-party engines since I do all my own coding from scratch, but from what I've seen, they are most definitely worth a try. Corona appears to be the easiest for simple 2D stuff. Unity is arguably the most powerful but is focused mostly on 3D. Cocos2D is probably too hard for a beginner.

Figuring out how a game is made by looking in its package contents is sometimes helpful for a few general hints, but you won't get much out of it, as you have already discovered.

For what you listed: The collision stuff is probably data that the game uses to figure out when the player is either touching something on the map or out of bounds, so it can react. It is likely a custom data file. Entities will probably contain information about each type of object in the game, such as what type and size of collision primitive to use (box, circle, polygon, etc), what texture to use, perhaps size, rotation, etc. Again, probably custom data file. The tilemap stuff will probably contain position information for each tile of each level's map, and might also have the starting positions and state for any other entities such as obstacles and enemies. Again, probably custom. PVRTC is an image file which uses special compression for mobile devices which use the PowerVR chipset, such as Apple's iDevices. It is highly useful for keeping video memory usage low on iOS for certain images, such as solid backgrounds, and frame animated sprites. The png files can't be opened probably because they are mangled by Xcode which strips the headers. When deploying your app from Xcode, it is optional. I believe there are apps which can open these mangled files, but I've never tried one myself.

(Jun 5, 2012 11:09 AM)imike1991 Wrote: how? which is its structure ? i would need make a png with photoshop , then to put in a tile mapper and then to for example cocos 2D in Xcode?

I would suggest sticking to 2D for your first game. The best thing to do is to make the imagery in Photoshop (or imported renders from Maya or whatever) and save them as PNGs. Start with just a simple background and simple objects at first. Then go download like Corona or something and try to figure out to put your images into it and animate them.

The first game I completed for iOS was designed by a graphics artist, which he mocked up in Flash. Then he sent me all the files and I reimplemented it all natively on iOS.

As I mentioned before and I will emphasize again: Start small! If you design a big game first before you implement any of it, you will fail. Start with one screen background, one player, and one enemy, and maybe one wall. Once you get those three things going, then you will have a much better idea of what to do next. Don't try to imagine how it all works beforehand. Figure it out one step at a time.

It's a good post. But it is written that Java is not fully suitable language for mobile app creation, But as far as I know for android app development any programmer should be familiar with Java language.